(Recasts with mediator quotes, details) By Jack Kimball KAMPALA, Dec 9 (Reuters) - Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has urged fugitive rebel Joseph Kony to sign a final peace deal, saying the Lord's Resistance Army boss has been told all about plans to lift an international arrest warrant against him. Kony has demanded International Criminal Court (ICC) indictments for him and his top deputies be scrapped before they quit forest hideouts in northeastern Congo and end two decades of conflict that have destabilised a swathe of central Africa. "President Yoweri Museveni has urged ... Kony to come out and sign the peace accord," Museveni's office said in a statement late on Monday. "The President noted that Kony has had enough time and brief on the ICC process as displayed in the draft peace agreement." Uganda's government has pledged to ask the U.N. Security Council to suspend the ICC warrants after Kony lays down his arms. But the self-proclaimed prophet remains suspicious. He is wanted by prosecutors in The Hague for his role in a war that has killed tens of thousands of people, driven two million more from their homes and destabilised neighbouring parts of volatile eastern Congo and oil-producing south Sudan. Uganda, Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) agreed in principle in June to launch joint military operations against the guerrillas if Kony did not sign. "PEACEFUL CONTAINMENT" Experts say there would be no easy victory against battle-hardened LRA troops who are skilled at launching hit-and-run attacks on much larger, better-equipped forces. The DRC army is tied up fighting its own insurgents further south in the Kivu region, while U.N. peacekeepers in eastern Congo are overstretched and haunted by a botched raid on the LRA in 2006 that killed eight Guatemalan commandos. The chief mediator in Uganda's peace talks, south Sudan's vice-president Riek Machar, said there was now little appetite in Kampala or Kinshasa for a fresh assault on the rebels. "Kony is deep in the Congo ... none of them really wanted to discuss any military action," he said in southern Sudan's capital Juba after returning from meetings in DRC and Uganda. "Generally they seemed to accept a policy of peaceful containment of the belligerency," he told reporters, adding Museveni would try to contact the LRA leader directly. Machar's talks were thrown into disarray in April when Kony refused to attend a signing ceremony on the remote south Sudan-Congo border. At a rare meeting with Ugandan elders in the area late last month, he again declined to ink the deal. [ID:nWAL063121] This year Kony's fighters -- notorious for mutilating survivors and kidnapping thousands of children -- have also trekked north to attack villages in Central African Republic. (Additional reporting by Skye Wheeler in Juba; Editing by Daniel Wallis)
A Congolese holds the hand of a child suffering from cholera in North Kivu province in the Democratic Republic of Congo in this November 11, 2008 photo released today by Medecins ...
